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Mod.pod.: Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Today, Caitlin and I move to the poetic teaching of Wallace Stevens. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is one of the puzzling statements in modern American poetry. It reveals the need for a new poetry that can, by image and by reasoning, recall our basic experiences and articulate our humanity in terms of our perennial temptation to make metaphors. The good and bad news Stevens brings is this: our intellect works in the element of the imagination.
Last week, we talked about his most beautiful poem, The Idea of Order at Key West.
That’s a poem about human striving–it brings this news, that being human is striving. Even being at rest is striving against the striving of the world. There, Wallace Stevens did for poetry what Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea did for manliness. He tried to express starting from mundane experiences that are ambiguous–are they modern? are they ancient?–the essential struggle of being human. That is, that being human is not moving toward peace and rest. There is no protective home for human beings in this world.
This week, we talk about Stevens and the bird that inspires him. It’s not Shelley’s Skylark, nor Keats’s nightingale. It’s not a birdsong bird! It’s not merely banal, but might recall death somewhat–it’s close to a crow. A new poetry comes out of paying attention to it, that replaces the old poetry of beautiful sounds and transcendent resplendence.
Here’s the poem and here’s Wallace Stevens himself reading it:
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You’re almost right: Wallace Stevens is a genius, but his best poem is “The Snow Man”. :)
Evening Titus,
Thanks for your continuing work. The image of the blackbirds does not add clarity to the concept that one should not overlook the common and that the common may be that which is truly valuable. The more real we consider the image of the blackbirds the weaker the poem. Only at a Marie Antoinette farm do blackbirds walk as pets among women’s legs, on the farm women shoo blackbirds because they are seen as vermin. To see the movement of the blackbird’s eye, the bird must be in the same room with you and the tension between the field and the ground would not exist.
Hello, Jim! Don’t damn Wallace Stevens for living the bourgeois life he lived. That, too, is part of America.
Frost was not a farmer, either.
You’d run out of poets sooner than you think this way…
People who live on farms & see blackbirds shooed by women have to do their own writing; perhaps they can be instructed by better poets–but those poets cannot live everyone’s experience…
Morning Titus,
Chaucer was living in the Marie Antoinette court and still did not live in the rarified air of Connecticut. I take your point about the need for farmer poets, but is it not too much to note that the bird whose eye you claims moves, moves not its eye but its head to track an object. Maybe the poem should have been about 13 ways to see an owl.
Probably, a blackbird is just shy of a crow…
Morning Titus,
My dopey mind has the hitch which which transposed your sentence into, a blackbird is a shy crow. And since I am easily entertained I can’t help but laugh.
Now I foolishly reveal myself as the philistine of poetry appreciation.
It’s a matter of keen intellectualism, patience and taste – of which I am clearly in short supply as applies to my appreciation of modern poets.
It was your voices that carried me lightly through the labyrinth of obscure intentions and the magicians sleight of hand. I’ve never enjoyed magicians. A dark art of hidden intentions.
I desire a poem that lifts me into light even as my knees buckle on encountering the metaphors that offer insight into the human heart, the human condition.
I want to share walks through the accessible and familiar even though the path is rocky and thunder rolls across a nearby valley.
And foolishly, I hope to glimpse a rainbow as the path ends in a clearing where new paths appear to the weary, but discerning traveler.
Still . . . your voices and brave trailblazing assure me that there are others who see clearly where I am blind :)
I agree, this sort of poetry is not for everyone, but I hope at least when explained, it does some of the work required to begin to wonder at ourselves & our faculties the right way!
Oh yes! But it frustrates me as I’m not as intellectually fluent as I’d like to be :)
PS. And speaking of “wonder” . . . Keithers and I are on our way to see the Falcon Heavy lift off!
Wow! Take video if possible!